Elon Musk recently announced his company Neuralink had implanted its device in a human brain for the first time.
At its heart, the device aims to allow users to take actions only through their thoughts. Musk has touted the ability to control a phone or computer by just thinking about doing something on them.
Bradley Gregor says this is a very exciting technology, and that it has a lot of potential. Greger is a professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University.
He joined The Show to discuss how this device relates to the work he's doing.
Full conversation
BRADLEY GREGOR: Very much so, this is work that I was involved with almost a decade ago, but using much simpler technology, technology that was in no way ready to go like into a hospital, just routinely. And what Neuralink has done is done that refinement and really taken it to a level that will significantly impact the quality of life for patients.
MARK BRODIE: Do you think that it will ultimately be at a place where it can get FDA approval and be used at scale?
GREGOR: Absolutely, it's certainly possible, and that's what they're doing right now. What will come out of these trials will be the data they'll take to FDA to say, you know, to show we can do it safely, it really will perform as we expect and treat the pathology we're trying to take care of, and that will lead to hopefully, then FDA approving it for probably, at first, a larger study, and then eventually it'll hopefully just become something a neurosurgeon can prescribe to a patient, say, somebody who has ALS and is locked in that this is an appropriate treatment, and they just do it and it goes to insurance and it's all done.
BRODIE: Is that the kind of application you mostly see somebody with a disease like ALS, where they kind of have lost the ability to communicate and maybe lost control of their body, somewhat?
GREGOR: Absolutely, at first, that's where it'll be. I mean, we were talking about a neurosurgical procedure. This is not something you do just trivially or routinely. Yeah, well, it is done routinely, but in the hospital setting, for a medical application, and there'll be, I think the first ones will be something like ALS, or people who are paralyzed. I think the big one on the horizon, though, is honestly turning the process around a little bit, where we're not trying to get information out of the brain, but we're trying to get information into the brain to restore sensation. And the big one is blindness is to restore vision. So we're now stimulating the brain, and the same technology could be used in that realm as well.
BRODIE: So not necessarily just, you know, we keep hearing Neuralink, you know, somebody can think something, and it can be written or spoken or acted in some way. But you're saying other senses maybe can be activated as well with this technology?
GREGOR: Absolutely. And we've known in my lab and other labs around the world and some other companies, that that can be done in a limited way. And we're not talking about restoring vision like people naturally enjoy, but it'd be useful vision to help people navigate an environment and that sort of thing. And so we know we can do that, but being able to do it in a patient for 10 years with it all fully implanted, that's what Neuralink is solving, and it's very challenging.
BRODIE: So I would think that for somebody, for example, you mentioned somebody with ALS, or someone who's paralyzed, this obviously could, if it works, and you know, the potential is reached, could have serious practical implications. What kind of psychological applications could it have as well for those patients who are able to maybe do things that they once had the ability to do but then lost?
GREGOR: Well, now this is a super important question. I guarantee you that people are thinking about this very carefully. There's both just the psychological impact of that change, the restoration of vision, the restoration of movement, the restoration of communication. That's going to have an impact, hopefully a very positive impact, where this technology could go in the future, though, and I think has really intriguing possibilities, is the study and understanding and potentially the treatment of more like cognitive level disorders, things like Alzheimer's, things like, you know, memory disorders of any kind, depression would be another huge one, very poorly understood, hard to study in the lab, but with the sort of device and a human could be directly approached and maybe understood better, and then also, hopefully even then treated, maybe using the device, lot to be learned and figured out there, though, before first.
BRODIE: Yeah. So I gotta ask you about sort of the creep factor here, in terms of, like, implanting something into your brain. Like I would think for a lot of people, that's kind of a bridge too far.
GREGOR: It’s a big deal. Seriously, I do not do this way. I just don't see people lining up, like, trying to get the new eye vision thing there. I don't know whether the goggles that Apple just really said everybody wants, yeah, I just don't see that happening, not in the near term. It's, you know, the potential to help somebody who has a real need is huge. If you're basically intact and your hands work and your eyes work, I just don't see the compelling need for that there in terms of just the fact that it's neurosurgery and it's an implanted medical device.
There are many devices out there already. I mean, the classic one everyone probably knows about is the cardiac pacemaker, very simple, but that's acting to help hearts. When you start talking about the brain, you're talking about influencing people's behaviors and thoughts, and that's different. So it is different. It's a little closer to home, I would say. But there are also predicate devices there that are shown to be very helpful. The big ones there would be the cochlear implant, which restores hearing to deaf people, right? Been done in probably, gosh, half a million people now, I'd guess.
The other big device that I am involved with a lot is the deep brain stimulator that's used to treat Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders. And this device is … miraculous. People have severe Parkinson's disease, you know, can't move, can't walk, have terrible tremors. Turn the device on, they get up and go ride a bike. It's remarkable. And those have been around for 30 years, and probably, gosh, probably pushing several 100,000 patients now, too. And there, you know, there is the potential for them to kind of go wrong and can cause some complications, but then you can tone it down and stuff.
The way I like to think of this is, it's like electrical pharmacology. It's just like a drug. I mean, we take drugs for depression all the time, quite effective. Have some side effects. This is the same thing you just were using electricity rather than a molecule. So to be careful, for sure, yeah, thoughtful, but nothing untoward that we haven't dealt with before.
BRODIE: I guess the difference for some people might be, though, that like you take medication for depression or for any ailment, it doesn't stay inside you forever, like the neural link in theory that's in there.
GREGOR: It is, in there. It's a device. It's implanted, but just like the drug, you can turn it off. But I know, I completely hear what you're saying, and this is to be done thoughtfully and carefully, lots of oversight. And I think you know, as the results of this initial trial come out, we'll start learning a lot more about it and get a much better understanding about what's happening.
BRODIE: So as these trials progress, I'm curious what you're going to be looking for, like, what sorts of things are you interested to see in terms of success versus not, or how applicable this might be, or how useful it could be for some patients?
GREGOR: Well, I'll tell you, the scientific community is going to be watching this very closely. And the big one here is really longevity, OK, that this can be implanted in the brain, and, you know, be fully implanted, wireless now, all that, but it needs to last decades. This, you know, this can't, you know, in my lab, I can do this sort of thing, and it'll work for a couple years, which is great. But you think somebody, you're asking somebody to undergo neurosurgery, very expensive to treat something, and if it starts just not being as effective in a couple years, that's a lot of effort. And then think of it as a loss. Then, too, for the poor patient, they get the restored vision, and then after two years it's gone, that's not OK. That would have, I think, profound psychological consequences, as well as just not working as it's supposed to. But I'm hopeful, because of the design of the technology, it could last decades, and that's what I'll be watching for.
BRODIE: Oh, that is really interesting.
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